The Hollow Heart by Marie Rutkoski

SID

I LOAD THE GUN, STUFFINGthe wad of blackpowder and the bullet down the short barrel; curl my blackened fingers around the grip; and take aim. The grip fits snugly in my hand. My father made it for me, just as he made my dagger. The barrel doesn’t waver. I pride myself on a steady aim, and when I miss it’s usually because I’m bored of impressing people on the sidelines. No one’s watching now, but I feel jumpy anyway, remembering my mother’s words. The painted tin target, set on the lawn near the tall white bones of birches, is fifty paces off—challenge enough, since that distance is where the gun begins to lose accuracy. I cock the firing mechanism.

“You’ll be late for dinner,” someone drawls in my ear.

The gun cracks, a plume of smoke rises in the air, and my shot goes wide. “Gods, Roshar! I could have killed you! I am going to kill you.”

“You love me.” Roshar takes the hot gun from my hand, turning it over in his, making an impressed grimace as he inspects the ivory handle. “Is this one of your father’s newer versions? You know, I gave him the idea for the gun, years ago, when he was but a poor, lost Herrani in my nation’s capital.”

“You did not.”

“Well, not directly.” As if confessing a secret, Roshar adds, in a lowered voice, “It was the mere presence of my genius that gave him the idea. I’m like one of your Herrani gods. I blessed him with divine inspiration.” He peers inside the flashpan. “I really like this new, small, handheld model. I think I’ll keep it.”

I take the gun from him and slide it into the holster at my right hip. It is my nicest holster, made from embossed black leather, and it shows boldly against my tan breeches and white tunic with its high, masculine collar and intricate black embroidery. Given that the state dinner is in my honor and I will be greatly stared at, I feel obliged to give the attendees a good show. I always draw the eye, not just for my good looks but also for what I do with them: my men’s clothes and boy-short hair and dramatic flair. I have decided to play to expectations tonight. No one, save my father, knows that I worked as my mother’s spy, or that I am useful for anything beyond spending my country’s gold and bedding its women. Let everyone believe I am the good-for-nothing princess. It is close enough to the truth, and if that makes the court let down their guard around me, it will be all the easier to investigate my mother’s claims. “Get your own gun,” I tell Roshar.

“No one takes me seriously,” he complains. “I miss Arin the tiger. I shouldn’t have left him in Dacra. Everyone takes me more seriously when he’s around.”

I examine my black-dusted hands, wondering whether to clean them before dinner. I like the disreputable look they no doubt give me, which would play well to the image I want to cultivate tonight, but my father won’t like it. He used to dream of being clean. A bar of soap was a miracle. He is too proud to remind me of this, but he would mention that my showing up dirty makes our guests think I don’t respect them.

Well, I don’t.

Pretend you do, my mother would reply.

“Your father wants a report on your time in Ethin,” Roshar says. “Before dinner. If you are quite finished with target practice. Not a single hole in the target, I see. That shot of yours was quite bad, little god-child.”

I ignore him, snapping the strap of the holster in place. It feels good to have my gun back. I like having my gun on one hip and my dagger on the other, my Herrani and Valorian birthrights in plain sight. I didn’t wear the gun in Ethin. Once I realized the island had no knowledge of this kind of weapon—indeed, no knowledge of blackpowder at all, and no cannons—I kept the gun hidden. No need to let a foreign nation know about a military advantage. Keep your strengths and weaknesses hidden, and reveal them only to your gain. “Etta sent you to find me?”

“I came purely for the delight of your presence.”

I remember staring down at my mother’s pale face. Poisoned? I said. Who would poison you?

That—she smiled—is a foolish question.

Oh, right. I forgot how many people hate you.

She looked up at me as though she were my child. In a small voice, she said, Is it so many?

I felt cruel. Well, I said evenly, as though the problem at hand were some boring mathematical equation we would solve together, it only takes one disgruntled person.

Yes, she said, her voice stronger. Exactly.

I know when your mother tells you she has been poisoned, it isn’t very daughterly to feel good—but I did, because I always liked working on a problem together, instead of being her problem, and when my mother respects you and takes you into her confidence, it is no small thing.

How do you know you’ve been poisoned? I asked.

I don’t, my mother said. I suspect it. Her lids half lowered. In that light, her brown eyes looked golden. Tired. She was at the end of her strength. Quietly, she said, Do you believe me?

When are you ever wrong?

All the time.

You?

I need to correct my mistake, she murmured, and this was like her: to be cupped in Death’s palm yet still hunt for something she had missed, to examine a puzzle for a better way to solve it. The gods alone knew what mistake she meant. It could be anything. There was always something she needed to perfect. Amma, I said suddenly, desperately, as though ready to beg, I will help you.

I know, she said, and was asleep.

Hope stirred within me. I brushed a lock of loose hair from her face, careful not to touch her skin. Maybe, if I could find who did this, I could also find a way to save her.

“To tell the truth,” Roshar says, still staring at the blank target, “I thought there might be something you’d want to tell me that, for personal reasons, you do not wish to tell your father.”

He has my full attention now. “Like what?”

“Oh, something to do with that girl, maybe.”

“I have nothing to say about Nirrim.” She did not love me. I was good enough for a time. It didn’t matter, in the end, how I kissed her. It didn’t matter how her body arched at my touch. It didn’t matter that she was tender. What mattered was her honesty when she admitted that she didn’t feel what I felt.

Do you not love me like I love you? I asked. Won’t you come with me?

No.

“Are you home for good?” Roshar asks carefully.

“Yes.”

“Then shall we?” He nods in the direction of the house. As I walk beside my godfather, I sneak a glance at him. He is not very tall for a man, and I am tall for a woman, so we are of a height. I see clearly the tension along his jaw—the way he avoids my gaze, yet feels it. My father’s truest friend. My mother loves him, too. Yet Roshar is no Herrani, and we have always known that his political loyalties are due first to his queen, not my country.

People don’t like to imagine the worst possibility, my mother often warns. And so they are caught unprepared when the worst comes.

Roshar quickens his pace. The smell of grass is raw and strong.

Could it be you? I wonder as he strides just ahead of me, as though to escape my glance, which I know has turned into an examination.

Did you pour poison into my mother’s cup?

My father smiles when I enter the library and touches my cheek—a light, fond double tap, as though he is settling something into place, and that thing is his idea of me. I bristle, though I know he means to be kind, and say, “What is so amusing?”

“Not amusing. I’m happy you’re home.”

I cannot say, I heard your silence in my mother’s suite. I have Sid, you said. No, she answered, You don’t. I cannot say, Why didn’t you defend me? I cannot say, I spied on you in your moment of fear, when you exposed what every single person in Herran, down to the smallest child, already knows, knows as intimately as they know the signs of a coming green storm: how utterly lost you would be if anything happened to your wife.

I say, “You find something funny.”

“People say you look like Kestrel, but no one looks like you. You would stand out anywhere.”

I look down at my freshly cleaned hands. “This is about how I am dressed.”

“It is more than that. But yes, a little.”

“Why must what I wear be such a favored topic of conversation?”

He considers this, rubbing the scar on his face. The open window lets in a warm breeze that lifts the edge of the curtain and lets it fall. Gently, he asks, “Do you not mean it to be?”

I fling myself down into an elegant reading chair, slinging my trousered legs over one arm and lounging against the other. “Yes, sometimes I want to be noticed. It also annoys me, how everyone finds my appearance so interesting. I can’t explain it. You want to have a state dinner to show everyone that your heir has returned and Herran is safe, the hereditary line unbroken. So here I am, your prize pony.” I hear my voice shrink. “I want to look good. But not your way. Mine.”

“Sid, you do.”

I look up at him. He does not tell me to sit up straight or remember my manners. He does not remind me of my duty as a princess. I say, the resentment clear in my voice, “You found me funny.”

He takes the chair across from me. He is too large for it, like a wolf in a birdbath. “If I found anything funny it was how we are different.”

A cold stone sits in my throat. I wish I had his height, his strength, the way he commands respect without uttering a word.

“What I mean is,” he says, “in a crowd, I would rather be invisible.”

“You are saying I’m a show-off.”

“Can we not have every word between us go wrong? I am saying that I like how you’re dressed, and if you enjoy holding the center of attention, that is no bad thing.”

“Right. Important for a princess and future queen.”

“Sid, why did you leave Herran?”

“I was bored.”

“That is not the real reason.”

“The parties here are always attended by the same people and I’ve slept with all the interesting ones. I require more variety in my entertainment.”

Nirrim calls this sort of thing a midnight lie: where I tell a truth that functions like a lie because I’ve said it in order to disguise a greater truth I don’t want known. The thought of Nirrim makes me wince. My father notices. He says, “If you sought pleasure, that doesn’t seem to be what you found.”

“You underestimate my ability to take pleasure in almost any circumstance, save this conversation.”

“Please,” he says, “answer a direct question. Don’t make a game of it.”

I shrug. “The god of games loves me.”

“You stole one of my ships.”

“Borrowed.”

“Sailed in the middle of the night.”

“The tide was right.”

“Left no note or word.”

“My actions spoke for themselves.”

“Why can’t you trust me? Why can’t you tell me what’s wrong?”

I shouldn’t have to. It should be obvious. No one has forgotten I am engaged to Prince Ishar, son of Queen Inishanaway, ruler of Dacra from its northern grasslands to its watery capital to its islands sprinkled in the sea. If my father cannot guess that I don’t want to marry any man, it is because he does not want to. My mother, who knows full well my refusal, since I screamed it at her the night I left, probably has said nothing of it to him. He would have mentioned it by now if she had. But he should know, and the fact that he does not proves that he does not know me.

The window brims with dark green lawn. An irrielle bird sings, ending with a percussive chirping as dry as the sound of snapping fingers. My father’s gray eyes search mine, worried, and I fill with anger, my pulse sharp in my throat. Yet I know how this feeling will end, because I have felt this way before, and the outcome is always the same. I will not show my anger because I am afraid of wounding him with it—especially now, when the person he loves most lies sick and he prays daily to his god, saying, I have served you. I am yours. Show mercy, and take me instead.

Do I know he does this for a fact? No. Yet he is Arin the Plain King. Death’s Child. My father. It is easy enough to imagine.

I want my father to imagine me.

My anger dissolves into sadness. I run a hand along the chair’s old brocade silk, which shines in places, lies flatly dull in others. My hand is not my mother’s hand, with her narrow fingers, strong yet soft. My hand resembles my father’s—rough from the sea and marked with scars, though mine are not from battle, merely training for it. Herran has been at peace the whole of my life.

My father’s eyes grow stern. Their gray is a typical Herrani color, but sometimes they look uncommon, even unnerving. He says, “I want an answer.”

“Maybe—” My voice cracks and sounds too high, truly like a girl’s. I clear my throat. “Maybe I wanted to make a name for myself. Arin and Kestrel, Kestrel and Arin. Everyone knows your story. What about mine?”

“Our story,” he says slowly, “is about how we suffered.”

“And found each other.”

“It is about how we never want what happened to us to happen to anyone else.”

“Yes, your love for the Herrani is well-known.”

“It is you of whom we think first.”

“Sometimes it is cold in your shadow.” I see him accept this, and his easy acceptance wrenches at my gut. My midnight lie has been too quickly swallowed. What I have said is true, and embarrassing, but I have offered up this woebegone tale of seeking fame and glory because it is believable. It keeps the rest of my reasons private. I continue, doggedly, “Do you remember how Amma suspected the southern isles of planning an attack on Valoria?” The southern isles—or the Cayn Saratu, as they are called in the tongue of their people—were once part of the vast Valorian empire, but were liberated when Verex, my mother’s old friend, was elected Magister in the days following the last war. As head of the Valorian senate, Verex ended rule over its stolen territories. This did not, however, make everyone happy. The southern isles are a well-known hotbed of Valorian malcontents who seek to restore the Empire’s former glory. They have plotted blackpowder attacks on the Valorian capital and its Magister, many of which my mother uncovered and foiled. “She asked me to examine all the known maps of the islands. She sent me hither and thither even to dilapidated country manors, to search their libraries. Every crumbling scrap of a map wasn’t enough. Valorians possess better maps, she said, then packed me off to Valoria.”

“This was last spring,” he said, recalling. “You went as our emissary for the introduction of Verex and Risha’s new baby to society. Six children, all healthy, thank the god of life.”

“The god of lust had more to do with it.” This makes him uncomfortable. I cannot resist needling him. “Nothing wrong with that. I am the god of games’s own child, but I light a candle in lust’s temple, too. It is because I am so pious.” I get cozier in the chair, wagging my polished boots.

He coughs. “So you went to Valoria.”

I roll my eyes at his discomfort. “I went to Valoria. Amma was right. They have better map collections.”

“Yes. It helped them win the first war.”

“And on one map—ancient, so delicate I had to glue a layer of transparent tishin paper to its back in order to handle it—I found a speck that shouldn’t have been there, that was on no map I had seen, a lost dot near the southern Herrani coast, amid the empty islands. Amma thought maybe the imperialist plotters were hiding blackpowder on this secret island, but when I sailed to the Cayn Saratu, practically no one had heard of the island. They said that region of the sea was known for shipwrecks. They warned me away. I believed they were lying, of course, and that Amma was right. Rumors of dangerous seas would be a good way to keep nosy spies like me away from secret stashes of blackpowder.” The Caynish had no guns or cannons or easy access to blackpowder, but Valorian imperialists imported it from the northern tundra and hid it in caves on uninhabited islands, or buried it in strongboxes in sandy beaches. “But the Caynish warned me of more than shipwrecks: local legend had it that travelers had come from that region of the sea, bearing magic trinkets.”

“Magic?” he says slowly.

“They showed me a couple of artifacts—a bracelet, a tooth-shaped box—but they were inert. Nothing special, beyond their ancient appearance. But, people insisted, the items used to be able to work magic. The bracelet used to be able to charm the wearer into shrinking to the size of a cat. The box used to be able to bite an enemy.”

“Sounds like a Caynish story.”

“So I thought. But I returned to Herran to consult our naval history collection, and speak with our older sailors, who knew the sea before the first war. It was true enough that that region of the sea was known for shipwrecks. Ships went missing in those straits. I decided to sail there, and see what was what.”

“You endangered yourself.”

“Just a little.”

“You could have died.”

“Yet here I am, safe and sound, your favorite child.”

“My only child.”

“Mad at me, Etta?”

“The least you could have done was to tell us this, and warned us where you were going, if you needed a vainglorious adventure,” he says, frustrated. “You are irresponsible, reckless—”

“Don’t you want to hear the best part?”

“I worry we sheltered you too much. You are afraid of nothing.”

“The magic is real.”

“Everything is a joke to you.”

“I mean it. I swear by the gods. What I saw on the island of Herrath has no logical explanation. I saw magic. I tasted it.” I remember the drop of blood, dark as a pomegranate seed, falling from the tip of Nirrim’s finger into my mouth. Later, Nirrim described what she had seen happen to me. Her magic immobilized me. My body lay rigid, my mind driven deep into a memory I hadn’t even known I’d forgotten.

My father’s silence grows heavy, wary, and while I know from my aunt Sarsine that the king has a temper, he has never shown it to me, not directly. Instead, he gets like this: warlike, his gaze acute, his expression showing that he does not know his enemy’s moves but he does not like what he suspects. Instead of looking angry he simply looks ready. “Etta, I am not lying. I am playing no game. Not this time, at any rate. I doubted the rumors, too, when I anchored in the harbor of the island’s city. The Caynish were not wrong: it was a tricky bit of sailing. The currents are nasty, the rocks sharp. Pretty place, though. Along the coast, I saw pink-sand beaches and fields of sugarcane, much like what the Caynish grow. The climate is hot enough to make clothes stick to your skin, the coastal waters a sheer teal. Lush vegetation, vines with purple flowers climbing over everything. And while I might have dashed the ship against the rocks several times, and split the belly of my hull along this kind of extremely hard, lavender coral that gave shallower waters a purplish tinge, I don’t think it was shipwrecks, really, that made sailors disappear in that region. Once I anchored in the island’s only city, and mingled with the people there, I realized an odd forgetfulness clung to everybody. The people seemed normal, and although the island’s climate and terrain share more in common with the Cayn Saratu, its people look like us.” I correct myself. “Like you. Like regular Herrani. Same skin, similar features. Your gray eyes. They are all light-eyed, with a little more range than we commonly see in Herran. More green.” I swallow, thinking of Nirrim’s earnest, jade-eyed gaze, then hurriedly add, “Even blue. They call themselves Herrath, and their language resembles ours so much that I picked it up even more quickly than I usually do a new tongue. I suppose because it felt familiar, not like a new language but like a faded memory of my own.” Most people would stare at me right about now, confused, but my father nods. My parents have a gift for languages—my mother especially, her speech flawlessly free of any accent. People do not often consider that my father’s thick accent in Valorian comes from how much he hates using that tongue. “The Herrath language’s habits, the grammatical turns … it all felt like that godsawful ancient Herrani poetry you have made me read. The city welcomed me. They were fascinated. I’m quite easy to adore, especially when I make clear that my family is wealthy nobility—don’t worry, Etta, I didn’t make it that clear. I told no one—ah, almost no one—that I was your child. But the people liked me; they liked my gold. They invited me to endless parties with beautiful people in sparkling attire, who ate dust that made the world seem joyful.”

“I am surprised you ever returned,” my father says dryly.

“The longer I stayed, the more eerie everything seemed. No one had any knowledge of the country’s history. If I said, Why do you have a Lord Protector who rules over the city and country? they looked at me blankly.” I describe how the people I encountered in those first few weeks thought I was an appealing novelty, a rich, fair-haired traveler from afar, which suggested that travelers had arrived on that island before. Yet no one could tell me when, and there was no evidence of any immigrant population. “Any question about the past made a Herrath sleepy-eyed. It is as it is, they would answer, which makes me suspect that it was not that sailors in those waters all went down in wrecks but that the cobwebby forgetfulness that clung to Herrath began to cling to them, too, and they never returned home. Or maybe the Herrath vaguely knew that travelers existed but they had come so long ago, maybe generations ago, that the memory of them was lost in a murky past. In that country, there was no such thing as a history book. The concept of history seemed foreign to them. Things felt strange—even the constant pleasure-seeking of the people I first met there struck me as odd. How did the wealthy fund their parties, pay for their elaborate clothes? Then I explored the city further, and saw the wall.” I explain the strata of Herrath society, how it was ordered into three strict classes—High Kith, Middling, and Half Kith, the word kith meaning something like “kind” or “sort.” The Half Kith were imprisoned behind a wall, their labor exploited by the noble class. The whole of society depended on making the Half Kith as drab as possible, as though forcing them to live in the very center of town, behind an enormous wall they could never pass, eating food without salt or spice, dressing in grays and browns every day, would make them forget they were human. The Middling class served the interests of the High Kith, acting as their servants and militia, helping to suppress the lowest class, who would pay with their lives if they ever tried to go beyond their wall—or would pay with blood, drained in vials, or hair sewn into wigs for High-Kith ladies, or organs for surgeries to improve the health of High Kith. The Half Kith, depending on the crime, could even find themselves Un-Kith: cast out of the city and forced to work in the sugar fields.

My father’s tight, jaw-hardened expression has nothing to do with me anymore. I say, “It was a … quieter kind of exploitation than the imperial conquest of Herran. It was not like what happened to you.”

“You can never really understand what happened to me.”

I will always sit outside my parents’ experience of the two Valorian-Herrani wars. “I am no judge of it. How can I be, when you are so loath to discuss it?”

Softly, he says, “I do not want you to understand it.”

“I am not complaining.”

“Sid, you are.”

“I like my soft life.”

“It was an ugly time. I have no words for it.”

“Good thing, then, that you have Amma, who understands you perfectly, with no words at all.”

The line of his mouth erodes, his expression going inward with sudden sorrow, and I feel like a sullen ass. Then a sharp sorrow of my own slits its edge along my belly. I remember my mother’s frail face, her gray cheeks, her blue-tinged fingers. My mother’s illness feels impossible. In my mind, she is immortal. “Etta,” I say, wanting to push past this horrible moment I have created, “the Herrath share our gods.”

He leans back in his chair. Surprise wipes his face clean. “They believe in the hundred?”

“Believe? Not quite. But they know the full pantheon. Sometimes their gods are called by other names—our god of souls is their god of love. The Herrath are not religious, though. To them, the gods are a quaint tale for children.” He takes a breath, as though to speak, but in the end says nothing, studying my face. He knows I am not a believer. I do my duty to the gods because he would harass me otherwise, with his gentle yet insistent disapproval, and because it makes me feel more Herrani, despite my looks. “Etta, I did not imagine that my report would be quite this uninspiring. I encountered a people who share our gods. And can work magic. I did good work as Herran’s spy. Amma—”

“Don’t trouble your mother with this. Let her rest.”

“How can you act as if I just described how the Herrath sift their flour and sweep their streets? Is it not useful to us, that we know of a land where magic exists?”

He cups his hands and spreads them wide, as though scattering seeds, or letting fall a thousand useless, invisible things. It is the Herrani gesture of skepticism.

I say, “How can you doubt me?”

“Sweet child, you are not known for your honesty.” When I protest, he says, “It is not that you are a liar, only that you are devious with your words and sometimes you prize your own amusement above all else and can say things you do not mean, for the fun of it.”

Fair enough. But I press on. “At first I didn’t believe it, either. I thought it was science, or sleight of hand. Then I met someone, a Half Kith. She had an eerily perfect memory.” I envision how Nirrim glanced at a letter in my hand, in my language, even though she could not understand it, and then recited my letter to me by heart, her accent heavy, the mispronunciations many, but each word correct, a sharp nail that drove into me. I had never meant for her to read the letter. Nirrim, I must leave you. It is too hard to want you, and know that you do not see me.

My father makes a noncommittal noise. “Some are born with such a gift. They can recite a poem they glanced at once, years ago. This is not magic.”

“She made me remember something I had forgotten. Her blood did it to me.”

“Her blood.”

“I drank it.”

His eyes widen.

“Just a drop,” I say.

“Describe this woman.”

She was Half Kith, I explain. An orphan who worked against the rules of her society to provide her people with forged passports that lied about their kith, gave them a chance to escape. “She reminded me of you, Etta.” I describe her serious manner, her goodness, how starved she was for love, so much so that she could not, at first, question her devotion to Raven, the woman who raised her—and used her. How resilient Nirrim was, and brave, to risk punishment—even death—for her actions, with no expectation of reward.

My father’s expression becomes knowing. “I see. One of your conquests, was she?”

“No.”

“I can tell that you liked her.”

Heat rises in my cheeks.

“Sid, it is always the same with you. Such feelings are precious, yet you treat women as though they are interchangeable, and one will do as easily as the other.”

“That is not true. Not with her.”

“As soon as a new one catches your eye, she is all you can think about, until you get what you want.”

He is not wrong, usually, but … “I am good to them.” How many of them said so, their lips parted beneath mine?

“You break their hearts.”

Would Etta chastise me if I were a man? Resentfully, I say, “I will do what I will.”

His expression closes. “I am not interested in your seductions, or this story of magic. I wish you would stop playing with people, Sidarine. You certainly will not play with me. You will describe the country you saw, their military assets, their customs and trade, and then we will attend the state dinner, where you will stand in your mother’s place and greet our guests.”

When I was little, he would sing a lullaby to me every night before bed. How did I get so far away from that moment, when I was cherished? How is it that right now, all I can see before me is the intimidating man who drove his sword into the chests of countless Valorians, who even once threw them off a cliff? Who orchestrated the poisoning of an entire gathering of Valorian lords and ladies, dancing and sipping iced apple wine until the first one began to choke?

My thoughts, hurtling ahead of me, stop hard.

Earlier, I had contemplated Roshar, wondering whether he could have poisoned my mother. Aloofly, even smugly, I told myself it was important to consider the worst, even if it meant thinking my beloved godfather had poisoned my mother. But that was not the very worst possibility.

It cannot be my father. I refuse to believe it. If it is true that my father harmed my mother, then my life is a lie, the world I understand does not exist, I know nothing, and I am no one.